So, the Virginia Supreme Court has just upheld a decision taking a young boy away from his lesbian mother. "An unfit mother," the Court declares, with the basis for this judgment apparently boiling down to her living in a lesbian relationship. Out where I live, in the mountains of Virginia, many people would assent to the wisdom of this judgment. Homosexuality is a perverted lifestyle, the reasoning goes, so it's best to extricate a kid from a sick environment. Don't let a child grow up in a home that will pervert his own sexual orientation. The remarkable thing about this argument is how robustly it survives contradictory evidence. In scientific journals, various studies show that children growing up with homosexual couples as parents are just as emotionally healthy as otherwise matched children growing up with heterosexual parents. And their sexual orientation? Despite the popular sense of homosexuality as a contagion, or as a kind of cult seeking recruits, the children raised by same-sex couples were no more likely to become homosexuals than other children. But hey! What's reality in the face of strongly held belief? You'd think that certainty of belief would correlate with that belief's basis in knowledge. But it seems we humans are often the most certain on subjects on which we are most ignorant. Do people go to heaven because of their good works or because of faith? That's the kind of question on which people seem most absolutely certain they're right. Too much of our public policy seems theological in this way. The triumph of belief over empirical reality can be found among both liberals and conservatives. Liberals plod ahead with social programs that should work, even if they don't; conservatives still push supply-side economics, making a molehill of the mountain of debt we acquired the first time we tried it. Our politics could use more of that good old pragmatic American respect for reality. Perhaps what makes ideology so impervious to outside reality is a hidden inner reality, the unstated passions that motivate policy. On the left, there is often envy of the rich and successful. On the right, an impulse to scapegoat the weak and vulnerable. And in this child custody case in Virginia? Beneath the impervious ideology that gives rise to the Court's decision to drive a wedge between this mother and her natural child, I suspect there lurks an inner reality of fear that makes just treatment of homosexuals still impossible in America.